What the Heck Cattle Have to Do with Environmentalism: Rewilding and the Continuous Project of the Human Management of Nature

ABSTRACT

In the 1920s and 1930s, an attempt was made to resurrect the aurochs (Bos primigenius primigenius), the extinct wild ancestor of contemporary domestic cattle. The back-bred species that was produced are called ‘Heck cattle’. I argue that the attempt to create the Heck cattle as a form of resurrected aurochs, and their subsequent use in rewilding projects (as in the Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands) is a prime example of the continuous human project of the domination of nature. The consideration of domination as an extreme form of management serves as a critical lens on the policy of rewilding, similar to long-standing critiques of the policy of ecological restoration by this author. Rewilding projects do not re-create a ‘wild’ nature free from human intervention and activity. Rewilding is another form of the human management of natural processes to achieve anthropocentric goals. My examination of the Heck cattle in the rewilding process is intentionally provocative because there is a connection to Nazism. I will argue that policies of rewilding have historical antecedents (and parallels in philosophical meaning) to the Nazi plans for re-creating an authentic Aryan landscape in the lands of Eastern Europe. The case history of the Heck cattle projects illustrates the danger of pursuing radical forms of management of the natural world.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecological restoration
• Heck cattle
• hybrid landscapes
• management of nature
• non-human autonomy
• rewilding

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Katz (2022) is a response to a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research (Volume 22, no. 2: June 2020) that is devoted to the ‘environmental history of the Holocaust’. It contains four articles by Polish scholars – Ewa Domanska, Agnieszka Klos, Jacek Malczynski and Mikolaj Smykowski – as well as a commentary by Tim Cole (Malczynski et al., 2020).

2. It might be objected that since the Heck cattle that survive today are the descendants of the ones produced by Heinz Heck, the brother critical of Nazism, that the entire connection to the Third Reich can be ignored. But the survival of the Heinz cattle (and the destruction of the Lutz cattle) is a mere historical contingency that does nothing to alleviate the conceptual connection between the goal of re-producing an extinct species for a project that was a central part of Nazi landscape management policy – as I will argue below.

3. The art analogy comes from Elliot (1982); see also Elliot (1997). Elliot’s arguments were the original inspiration for my work critical of ecological restoration.

4. My views on the meaning and value of ecological restorations are not uncontroversial. The sharpest critics of my arguments are Lo (1999) and Vogel (2002, 2003). I have responded to Lo and Vogel in Katz (2012, 2015), and Vogel has continued the discussion in (Vogel, 2015). Support for major points in my critique of restoration can be found in (Siipi, 2003, 2008), although Siipi does not agree with my arguments completely.

5. Is the recognition of this spectrum practically useful to differentiate the benign control of natural processes from the evil domination of them? Well, without a careful casuistry of all possible interventions into natural processes (which I believe is an impossibility), we are left with a merely conceptual framework to help us understand the way that human interaction limits the autonomy of natural entities and processes. This conceptual spectrum is practically useful as a warning, a reminder, that human policy goals and actions can slip into the realm of domination.

6. One might ask why Lorimer and Driessen felt the need to distance the contemporary re-wilding project that uses Heck cattle from the older Nazi project? Perhaps it is because they see that the political ideas that motivate an environmental policy project can be seen to determine the scope and format of a project, and thus, it becomes crucially important to differentiate benign and evil political goals in the development of environmental policy.

7. I want to thank Chris Gineros for providing me with the inspiration for this essay. I also wish to thank two anonymous reviewers of the earlier versions of this essay for their very close reading of the manuscript and their insightful and useful criticisms. My attempts to respond to their criticisms have made the argument of the essay more clear and powerful (I hope). Of course, I do not expect the reviewers – or any other readers – to accept my arguments or conclusions without reservations: I welcome continued discussion on the points I have made in this essay.